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How Twitter poisoned politics

prospectmagazine.co.uk

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Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#151

Post by fjsolwmv »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #60
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

Many have a justified distrust of any 'reputation systems', just look how the concept is used in China. Whoever controls the system has great potential for social engineering

Mob brigading and SEO techniques aren't better. Distributed, personalized reputation systems give democratic control.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#152

Post by amanaplanacanal »

Shish2k wrote: post #89
eric_h wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> America wasn't like this 20 years ago. 20 years ago was 1998, the year Clinton was impeached - the politics were just as slimy 20 years ago, the reality of it was just not as readily at our fingertips as it is today.

20 years ago, Clinton tells a lie about his personal life and gets impeached; today, Trump lies about things which have actual life-or-death consequences for US citizens, and that's just ordinary political background noise and you're crazy if you get upset by such a minor thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well... the lie about his personal life was under oath, and about sexual behavior in the office during a lawsuit about sexual harassment. I think Clinton was a pretty good president, mostly, but this seems like impeachable behavior to me.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#153

Post by amanaplanacanal »

bobbygoodlatte wrote: post #62

I'm glad the article mentioned Twitter's engagement algorithm — I don't think enough attention is being paid to it. With a different algorithm Twitter could be a remarkably different experience. The current one has a strong bias toward engagement & velocity. It amplifies anger, outrage, and bad faith arguments over less "engaging" content. If Twitter let off the engagement pedal a bit and re-factored the algorithm, o…

But engagement is what makes them the money! The profit for them is in never seeing that this is a problem. There may be no way to fix this.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#154

Post by amanaplanacanal »

gaius wrote: post #39

I can’t remember who originally said this, but the problem with Twitter is that you think you’re engaging in jokey banter with your mates but random strangers are reading each tweet without context in absolute seriousness and judging you

Exactly! "Kill all white people" sounds way different from the outside than from the inside.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#156

Post by liftbigweights »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

> Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral.

Don't forget the little old Hamilton-Burr incident in Weehawken. It's so odd to read journalists whining about poisoned politics. If you go back in history, there hasn't been a period where we didn't have political contention. And a lot of that was fueled by newspapers ( many times owned by politicians themselves ). One of the reasons for the Hamilton-Burr duel was because of hate Hamilton's newspaper ( NY Post ) wrote about Burr.

> Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputation systems, which at least provide a gradient of user interaction instead of just blacklisting.

They should let it be a open uncensored platform to ideas and opinions. If anything limit the journalists, newspapers, etc. Twitter and the rest of social media used to be fun ( even if was offensive ). It became toxic when so many journalists/media types started getting involved.

Take twitter. Who is responsible for a significant amount the toxicity? The journalists and celebrities with the blue check mark.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#157

Post by poilcn »

slg wrote: post #79
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutio…

In most countries in the world either nowadays or in historical perspective it would be unimaginable that there would be a dialog between different cluster of powers. They'd just try to destroy each other no matter what.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#158

Post by PhasmaFelis »

eric_h wrote: post #71
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America wasn't like this 20 years ago. Politics has always been bad, and there's times it's been even worse, but that doesn't mean it's not trending downward right now.

> America wasn't like this 20 years ago. 20 years ago was 1998, the year Clinton was impeached - the politics were just as slimy 20 years ago, the reality of it was just not as readily at our fingertips as it is today.

It was slimy as fuck, but it wasn't this bad. Someone like Trump could never have been taken seriously 20 years ago; a lot had to change to get us to this point. There's ample and varied evidence that American partisanship has skyrocketed in the last quarter-century (for example: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/05/takeaways-on...).

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#159

Post by charlysl »

slg wrote: post #79
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Was there a time when politics wasn't full of poison? By the end Thomas Jefferson hated George Washington so much he refused to attend his funeral. And that's just 242-year history of America, you can go back to Rome, Greece or Ancient Egypt and see thousands of years of vitriol inside any large human collective. Modern tools could do a better job, sure. Twitter, FB, YouTube and the rest could use some kind of reputa…

Politics may never have been pure and things today aren't as bad as they were at certain points in human history, but I am honestly surprised that people here aren't recognizing that there has been a pretty stark change in how politics have been progressing in the last decade versus the several previous decades. The polarization has increased drastically and the civility of political discourse and faith in institutio…

I agree that politics has polarized in the last decade, but I would say the primary cause is the wave of populism in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which has overlapped with, and been amplified by, the social media explosion.

Re: How Twitter poisoned politics

#160

Post by ppseafield »

chasd00 wrote: post #111
hnruss wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's classic divide and conquer. The ultra rich have framed politics as red vs. blue, when in reality it has always been (and always will be): them vs. the rest of us.

i remember during the financial crisis thinking if only the tea party and the occupy crowd realized they were two sides to the same coin maybe something great could have happened. I feel like that dawned on the powers-that-be and the old divide and conquer technique was quickly applied; tea party turned far right, occupy turned far left and they've been fighting ever sense.

The Tea Party was funded by the Koch brothers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-bill...

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